


Winds of Change and Chance

by deathbyspaceglam



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Force-Sensitive Finn, Gen, Ignores TLJ, TLJ what TLJ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 14:11:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14286633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathbyspaceglam/pseuds/deathbyspaceglam
Summary: Finn learns and re-evaluates.





	Winds of Change and Chance

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Finn Appreciation Week with the prompt _love_.

“I’ve got to get to my droid before the First Order does!”

“A droid!?”

“He’s a BB unit. Orange and white, one of a kind.”

So Poe loved his droid. Of course he did, Finn came to rationalize. After all, the droid carried information crucial to the Resistance. It was strategically important, useful. That was love, wasn’t it?

Sweat stung his eyes. He reached up to wipe it away, but the hard plaster of his armor did little to help. Frustrated, he tore away the plaster armor covering his arm and wiped his forehead with the cloth underlayer.

The plaster tapped lightly on the sand as it fell. Finn continued to walk, tearing off more plaster as he went.

_Slip’s bloodied hand, the smear on his own helmet…_

Valuing something useful or important was love. So then, why had he turned back? Slip had been his friend, or at least the closest he could call to a friend since the snowspeeder incident, but let’s face it, he wasn’t exactly what you would call strategically important. Finn shuddered as he remembered the way the others had scoffed at him for helping. The way, time and time again, that he had been advised to just forget about Slip, who wasn’t soldier material, and told that he should only focus on himself.

It hadn’t been love that had motivated him. So what had it been?

“Foolishness, borderline treachery, disregard for the First Order.” Unbidden, these words rang through his head in Phasma’s voice.

 _No. Those words don’t matter to me now._ He didn’t know what he was going to do now, but there was no way in hell he was going anywhere where those words mattered.

\---

Whatever those feelings were, they kept coming back.

When Rey, his new friend, saved him from the rathtar. When BB-8, that charming little droid, flicked their welding torch in the droid equivalent to a thumbs-up. When Han Solo, the war hero, called him “big deal”. A sharper version of it, almost like a stab through the chest, when he watched helplessly from the ground as Rey was kidnapped.

And when they landed on D’Qar and Finn learned that Poe was alive after all and rushed into his arms. Then it was like an ocean wave, smacking him with its full force and carrying him away from all his worries. For a moment, he let it. Then he remembered Rey and the sharp feeling came back.

“That was incredibly brave, what you did. Renouncing the First Order, saving this man’s life.”

Was it? It had just been the right thing to do. But it had been a real struggle to do it, since Finn had been forced to confront the idea that everything he had ever been taught was _wrong_. Maybe that’s what General Organa meant.

_She just thinks you have useful information. She thinks you’ll be useful for her._

_No,_ Finn forcefully told himself. _This is your chance to save Rey. Thinking like a stormtrooper has no place here._

\---

A lot had happened in two months. The Resistance had destroyed Starkiller Base and promptly moved their base elsewhere. The old astromech R2-D2 had woken up and completed the map to Luke Skywalker. Rey had left to find him as Finn healed from his injuries. And as his recovery was almost complete, Finn discovered that he was Force-sensitive.

It had actually been Leia (she insisted he use her first name) who’d told him. Poe had been visiting him in the medbay and dozing off in a chair next to him and Finn had been thirsty, but he hadn’t wanted to wake Poe. There was a glass of water on his bedside, just out of reach, and as Finn stared at it, it started vibrating in place, loud enough that Poe jolted awake. “Is there an earthquake?” he asked. After verifying that the glass was the only thing vibrating, he ran off. Minutes later, Leia came to the medbay to find Finn awkwardly drinking from the glass.

Once he finished drinking, Leia set the glass back in its original position. “Show me what happened,” she said. Finn stared at the empty glass. At first, nothing happened. He imagined that the glass was full of water. It tipped slightly from side to side and slid a few centimeters toward him.

Leia told him that this meant he had the same power that Rey did, which had let her pull the lightsaber out of the snow during their fight with Kylo Ren. She told him about how her brother (who really was the legendary Luke Skywalker!) had wanted to teach people like them and rebuild the Jedi Order, and how, since Kylo Ren had destroyed so much he’d worked for, he’d disappeared.

“So Rey is trying to remind him of what he was originally working for?” Finn asked.

Leia nodded.

“It might work better if I was there too,” he suggested.

So once his back was fully healed, Finn was off to Ahch-To.

\---

When she saw him again, Rey called Finn’s name and ran toward him, only stopping herself at the last minute from embracing him. Instead, she asked, “How’s your back?”

“It’s healed,” Finn said. “The doctor said to go easy on it for another week, but I can at least stand and walk.”

They climbed the stone steps together, Finn retelling the story of the vibrating glass and Rey complaining about how little progress she’d made with convincing Luke to train her.

“But surely now that there are two of us, he’ll start teaching actual lessons,” she said.

They reached the top of the island. Rey led Finn to one of the huts and knocked.

“Master Skywalker?”

A grunt from within.

“Master Skywalker, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

The door opened. An old man with wild gray hair and beard stuck out his head.

Finn nervously held out his hand. “Uh, nice to meet you… Master Skywalker. I’m Rey’s friend, Finn.”

To his surprise, Skywalker actually shook his hand. “What brings you here?”

\---

It seemed that having more than one potential student was enough to convince Skywalker to work teaching into his busy schedule of catching fish and sulking in his hut. During the day, they did practical exercises, breaking for meals and conversation. In the evening, they studied the sacred texts by firelight.

And there was a lot in the texts to study. Over the course of his life, Skywalker (“Luke is fine,” he’d said) had collected volumes from all over the galaxy, some of which were over a thousand years old. Luke emphasized the differences between volumes from different time periods.

“When my father was alive,” he said, “Jedi tradition was strict and stuck in place.”

“Like a deeply wedged rock you can’t lift,” Rey joked.

Luke rolled his eyes. “Exactly. It was a rock at the bottom of the ocean with an X-wing parked on top of it.” Finn called the image to mind. “But it wasn’t always like that. There was a time, a couple thousand years ago, when it was always changing. Masters were always debating the Code. This one here,” he said, pointing to a thick volume covered in dust, “is a collection of letters between Masters where they discuss the Code.”

Finn opened the book and flipped through the pages. On one page was an illustrated explanation of a lightsaber technique that was invented when blasters were popularized. On another was a map of where the best places to get kyber crystals were. On another, a heated debate over whether it was better for a Master to train multiple students at a time or just one.

“Wow,” he whispered.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” said Luke. “But at some point in the last millennium, the tradition got solidified, and since then, it’s only gotten more and more restrictive. Of course, there were still some who disagreed. Give me that.” Finn handed him the book and he turned to a page very late in the book, almost at the end. “The Jedi of my father’s time believed that attachment was the path to the Dark Side, and they had a strict definition of what ‘attachment’ was. This guy here, Djinn Altis, he had a different view than the Grandmaster. He says here-” Luke indicated the text- “-that maybe the Jedi’s adherence to tradition was an attachment.”

“What happened to him?” asked Finn.

“None of the other Masters took him seriously, except maybe a few. He eventually left and started his own Order somewhere else. The trail ends there.”

Finn thought back to his history lessons in the First Order and to all of what he’d read while in the Resistance medbay. He knew that the First Order’s predecessors, the Empire, had carried out a genocide of the Jedi and of any Force users other than the Emperor and his right-hand man.

“...Anyway,” said Rey, breaking the tense silence, “you said that Djinn Altis had a different view than the Grandmaster about what an attachment is. What do you think?”

“Me?” said Luke. “I know what the popular opinion did to my father. The view on what an attachment is contradicted the rest of the Jedi philosophy. He told me that he used to cope with the dissonance by defining compassion as ‘unconditional love’ and keeping it separate from ‘attachment’ and ‘possession’ in his mind.”

Compassion. Unconditional love. Something in Finn’s mind stirred, remembering his dilemma.

What was compassion? Immediately, a series of images flickered through Finn’s mind. Offering Slip his hand when he fell down. Refusing to shoot the villagers. Breaking Poe out of his cell. Poe determinedly steering them back to Jakku, explaining that he was going back for his droid. Rey saving him from the rathtar. Solo, even knowing that his son was hopelessly lost, still giving him a chance.

Unconditional love… He’d read that true love was unconditional. He hadn’t thought about it at the time, but now, he supposed it meant that while one could value a useful or important thing, true love was to value someone regardless. No, not just value. True love was to care for someone, to prioritize their life and wellbeing, to show them compassion without demanding a price. True love was Rey, Poe… and BB-8.

“Finn?” That was Rey, nudging him lightly in the ribs. “Is something going on?”

“I think I want to learn binary.”

**Author's Note:**

> The stuff about Djinn Altis is from Legends. The rest of the Jedi Lore™ is headcanon.


End file.
